Description
Berlin-based electronic artist Nadia Struiwigh returns to her own imprint Distorted Waves with IKIGAI, her fifth album and most personal work to date. Written in the wake of her father’s sudden passing, IKIGAI — derived from the Japanese concept meaning “reason for being” — is a sixteen-track meditation on grief, memory, and the slow, searching return to life.
Across its runtime, Struiwigh moves through moods of disbelief, nostalgia, psychedelia, and hard-won acceptance. From the eerie ambience of opener ‘Phantom Frequency’ to the childhood echoes of ‘Debugging The Soul’, the earth-honouring philosophy of ‘Gaian’, and the machine-ballad intimacy of ‘4 4 4’, every sequence and texture carries the emotional weight of lived experience. Lead single ‘Kokoro’ channels her DnB and jungle influences into a half-step urgency, before the title track closes the album with a cathartic, purging surge of soundsystem pressure.
A long-standing resident at Berlin’s legendary Tresor club and a voice on labels including CPU, Nous’Klaer Audio and Dekmantel, Struiwigh has built a reputation for work that moves fluidly between deep ambient electronics and the kinetic force of techno, electro and jungle. IKIGAI strips that craft back to its most vulnerable core — recorded in her Berlin apartment, metres from the beating heart of Neukölln — and finds something essential: the unbreakable bond between artist, machine, and meaning.
Tracklist:
- Hikari 04:55
- Phantom Frequency 03:24
- Kairo 03:20
- Ouroboors Loops 04:48
- Kintsugi Machine 04:37
- Debugging The Soul 04:20
- Gaian 04:13
- Night Changer 03:54
- Magnetic Light Magnetic Night 04:49
- 4 4 4 03:41
- Circle The Sun 04:47
- Last Light Transmission 04:16
- Kokoro 05:11
- IKIGAI 04:29
- Hito No Kaze 04:50
- Horizon and Opulence 04:59
Genre: Ambient Electronic / Techno / Jungle / Electro
Format: Digital (Vinyl coming soon!)
Label: Distorted Waves
